Electoral Law of 31 May 1850
1850년 5월 31일 선거법
Part of French Second Republic
The electoral law passed by 433 votes to 241 by the Legislative National Assembly of the French Second Republic on 31 May 1850. By requiring proof of three years' residence in the same commune or canton, it struck some 2.8 million voters off the rolls, above all migrant workers and the poor. Drafted by seventeen leaders of the Party of Order, the so-called Burgraves, and hence also called the "law of the Burgraves", it was abolished by Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte in his coup of 2 December 1851.
In depth
After the election of May 1849 the Legislative National Assembly was dominated by the Party of Order, which brought together Legitimists, Orléanists and moderate republicans. When the Mountain won the by-elections of 10 March and 28 April 1850, electing even the novelist Eugène Sue, the frightened majority decided to take the vote away from a large part of the popular electorate. In early May the Interior Minister Baroche convened a commission of seventeen members to draft the bill. It included the leaders of the majority, Thiers, Molé, Montalembert and Berryer, who were nicknamed "the Burgraves". Léon Faucher, the rapporteur, presented the bill on 8 May, and the Assembly voted urgency by 453 votes to 197.
The law left the principle of universal suffrage standing and changed the conditions. Article 2 put on the electoral roll only those who had lived in the commune or canton for at least three years, whereas the decree of 5 March 1848 had required six months. This excluded a large part of the village artisans, the industrial and farm workers and the journeymen on their tour de France, who moved from site to site for work and were the people least under the influence of the parish priests and local notables. Since residence was mainly proven by entry on the roll of the personal tax, the poorest were also pushed out. Article 9 excluded those sentenced to more than a month in prison for rebellion or for offences under the laws on gatherings and clubs.
In the debate Victor Hugo attacked the law for making "six million privileged" rule "three million excluded" in feudal fashion, and Cavaignac, Lamartine, Jules Grévy, Pierre Leroux, Paul de Flotte and others spoke against it. Montalembert replied that a war had to be waged against socialism as the expedition to Rome had been waged against the Roman republic, and on 24 May Thiers branded the people "the vile multitude". The law passed on 31 May by 433 votes to 241. The electorate fell by almost a third, from 9,618,057 to 6,809,281; in Paris it fell from 224,000 to 74,000, and in the workers' town of Lille from 15,058 to 4,524.
President Bonaparte promulgated the law on 3 June 1850, but after the failure of the constitutional revision that would have allowed his re-election in July 1851 he turned it into a weapon against the Assembly. He demanded its repeal in a message of 4 November, and on 13 November the Assembly rejected the repeal by 355 votes to 348. This gave him his pretext for the coup: on 2 December Bonaparte decreed the repeal of the law together with the dissolution of the Assembly. Since no general election was held in the meantime, the only election held under the law was a Paris by-election on 30 November 1851.
In The Eighteenth Brumaire Marx wrote that "The law of May 31, 1850, was the coup d'etat of the bourgeoisie." "On March 10 universal suffrage declared itself directly against the domination of the bourgeoisie; the bourgeoisie answered by outlawing universal suffrage. The law of May 31 was therefore one of the necessities of the class struggle." He also noted that while the law shrank the electorate it kept the constitutional minimum of two million votes for a valid presidential election, so that it tried to slip the election of the president from the people into the hands of the National Assembly.